A one-year Jew-niversary look back

Yesterday, Facebook reminded me that it was exactly one birthday ago that my nearly two-decade-long journey of religious self-discovery completely jumped the tracks. Ran off the road. Stalled out and seemed unlikely to recover its lost altitude.

I had spent a dozen and a half years exploring every liberal fringe or offshoot of Christianity I could find. Quaker theology often seemed the best description of the God I was looking for, but Quaker practice only gave me tantalizing glimpses of that divinity. In all its beautiful simplicity, Quakerism was too austere, too DIY, too empty of the day-to-day (and holy day) trappings of religion to fit me and my family. Unitarian Universalism was a delightful playground for my mind at first, willing to let me ask any question I wanted and answer it however I wanted to (as long as my answers didn't make anybody feel excluded or sound too much like the religions other people were running away from), referencing any spiritual or religious framework in the history of the world, or none at all. But as the UU in-joke goes, I got tired of addressing my prayers to "to whom it may concern" -- my brain got tired of endless questions with no Ultimate Concern answers, my soul was not being connected to the Source that could sustain it, and my religious identity (and my family's) was in perpetual flux.

But what finally wore out the tires on my religious journey vehicle was the doomed project of being a liberal-yet-mainstream Christian, trying to reconcile personal beliefs that Christianity has historically (and repeatedly) rejected with a Protestant religious framework that says belief is everything, constantly needing to check on whether the religious company I was with were "safe" to admit my liberal views to -- are these Christians liberal enough to be on board with gay marriage? With interfaith cooperation? With fighting global warming? With dropping the whole talk of who's been saved and who's going to heaven and just focusing on making things all right down here?

I almost gave up. I dropped out of Christianity, and I almost disavowed the religion thing entirely, which would possibly have been a disaster for me, because I am at core a religious person. Homo religosus. A person who looks for meaning in the everyday events of life, who wants to mark time -- and break up the monotony of days -- with sacred days, who wants to feel a purpose in life, whose soul needs to be fed and watered periodically at the Source of all being. I think I'm not alone in that -- I think more of us are this way than will admit it in this anti-religious age.

Instead, on the advice of a Facebook friend of many years, I steered my tired religious vehicle onto yet one more road, for one last-ditch effort to find my religious way. The Jewish road is an old road, for sure, but one continually being renewed. One with a definite direction and yet a tremendous variety of lanes, especially given the number of travelers on it. Certainly a road less traveled than most other major religions, a road apart from the vast Christian highway that most everyone else I know at least occasionally putters away on, and yet today I feel like I have more fellow-travelers on my religious journey than I have had in decades.

Looking back on the past year, I see perhaps the best year of my life to date. I see a trail of Saturdays in which I actually spent time doing things that mattered with my wife, my children, and my Torah study group. I see a trail of holiday celebrations that made each season feel special and scattered the year with joy instead of saving it all up like a miser for that one day in December (surely you know the one I'm talking about). I see myself growing into a new identity that I'm not afraid to express or claim, feeling a renewed sense of life purpose, getting closer to my family and feeling more myself at the same time, becoming a part of two new communities and, bigger than that, becoming part of an alternative to the tired, materialistic and individualistic Western Civilization that had gotten to feel so oppressive.

Sure, I also see myself starting to bristle at subtle anti-Semitisms and unconscious Christian exclusivisms, like people ending Commencement prayers with "in Jesus name" or using "the year of our Lord" instead of "CE" or just assuming that everyone in the room celebrates Christmas and Easter. I see myself trying to decide who it is safe to reveal my Jewish-ness to, and even in those cases enduring the "you're *Jewish*" response as if I had just admitted to being from Mars. I find myself knowing for the first time what it means to be a minority.

But I don't feel alone in the slightest. When I look back at the last year of my religious journey, I find that I finally have no question that I am on the right road for me. It's a road full of practices that feed my soul, full of people who don't require me to pretend to be something else, full of traditions that have meaning and full of room for me to make my own way, full of holidays to celebrate and prayers to say (without having to pretend I believe things I don't!) and songs to sing and more candles to light and wine to sip than you can imagine. Most of all, when I look back at the last year, I see that I am no longer alone on the road, for I have finally found my place among my people.

It's gonna be a heck of a ride. Anybody want to come along?